Of Interest

Frank and I had an exchange about safety at a school like Yale in New Haven, v a place like Williams. Is safety a consideration for parents and students when choosing a college? Williams is in a sleepy little New England town, it has its own internal housing and dinning, essentially sheltered from the world. No doubt, it is very safe. The students do not mix much with the outside populace. Is that better for education? Do young people learn something more from living on the economy and interacting with the larger culture around them? Is a “safer place” really better for a young adults development?

Are the bonds that are formed by Williams graduates and the high degree of loyalty and % of alumni giving partially related to the fact that the Williams experience is a unique experience that everyone shares? Is it harder for the individual to have a unique experience in a setting like that? Does Williams impact its students more culturally than other places because it is so self contained?

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24 Responses to “Is it better to be safe?”

frank uible says:

If you were a female high schooler who desired to go to college and who had been accepted at both Yale and Williams but nowhere else with no expectation of any other acceptance, what would you do, given the relative lack of security in and around the Yale campus?

Yale is safe. My wife did a year there after grad school… in 2001. New Haven is a relatively safe town. Frank is touching on something… Williams is small segregated and proetected from the larger world, while Yale is not. So I guess it depends on what you want to call safe, and what kind of expereince you want. I suppose you could live your entire life in a gated community and be very safe, if that is what you want.

Yale or Williams, that depends, what you want to study and what kind of expereince you want to have in college. If you want a prep school type experience with amazing liberal arts, Williams… if you want a university with a broad range of really solid programs, a place that is connected to the larger world , Yale.

I’d pick Yale or even a state school above Williams because of lifestyle… but a lot of young adults like the prep school type of scene… dorm living, and a segregated campus. Plus the connections at Williams never die. Williams is a great school, no doubt about it.

I am sure Yale has its own housing and dining as well — in fact essentially every close competitor of Williams houses and feeds the majority, in many cases the vast majority, of its students on campus. The only difference is that some places might have more off-campus dining options. But in terms of substantive interactions with people off campus, I bet folks at Yale engage in that sort of interaction no more than Williams (probably less, because of the safety / fear factor). Williams is certainly sheltered in many ways, but you are setting up a false dichotomy when you assume that places that compete with Williams for students feature more integration into the community — I don’t think that is the case at any of the NESCAC or Ivy League schools, or at least not most of them.

The question is really do you want to be surrounded by a sleepy, beautiful New England town, or a more bustling urban environment, with the dangers and opportunities that entails. But my friends who went to urban schools still ended up living on campus at least 2-3 years, eating quite a bit on campus, and befriending other students at their campus. that is the nature of residential colleges. The only exceptions would be true city schools like BU and NYU.

For example, I went to grad school at UChicago, which like Yale has serious safety concerns due to the neighborhood. I’d say students there were LESS inclined to trust / interact with random non-UofC people, because they were SO concerned about safety.

Williams could always import a few homocidal sociopaths to Williamstown in order to add to the cultural experience for its students. I think that I have some room for them to lodge in my basement – they’ll have to find their extra-curricular entertainment on their own.

Jeffz- I think you are wrong about that. When my wife was at Yale and I would visit her, we saw a lot of the students out in town as well, mingling. I was struck by how diverse the night life was, and how many different types of people were hanging around- Yalies included.

Yale also has a lot of outreach in the town through a wide variety of programs, and the graduate schools definitely add to the sense of a more diverse and integrated student body. My wife worked for the school at a number of local grade schools… as part of an outreach program. It was required.

Well, we are talking about undergrads, not grad students. And there are more nightlife options in almost any place that is not Williamstown. So sure, you will see students out more; there is hardly anyplace to GO out in Williamstown, and the few places that there are will be largely overrun by students. But in my experience at a school like Yale, and my friends’ experience at Ivy league schools, they tended to primarily live on campus, at least for the first few years, primarily eat on campus, and certainly, the close friendships they formed were almost entirely with other students. Look at the stats to look up what percentage of undergrads at Yale (especially the first two years) live in campus dorms, I guarantee you that, while smaller than Williams, it is still WAY higher than you seem to assume. It is a residential college.

Williams has a TON of local outreach too, in terms of community service, by the way. Almost every local service organization is totally infused by a Williams influence. The difference is, it is a much smaller community to reach out to, so the integration between school and town is more seamless …

I believe they require Freshman and Sophmores to live on campus though jeff…. that means that a lot of upper classmen are living out in town. Like 25%. I think they require that partially because they would end up with empty housing if they allowed students to live off campus earlier.

Williams has I believe something like 20 percent of its seniors living off campus — which is FAR higher than Harvard, based on the link I posted, and not THAT much less than Yale. You are wrong on this — the numbers don’t lie — you can say there are big differences between the schools, but the fact is, at any Ivy or NESCAC school, all or almost all students are basically going to be living in campus housing for three years, and fourth year, a substantial percentage will be. And lots of schools, including Yale I’d bet, have campuses that are less integrated into the community than Williams’ … believe me, I doubt New Haven residents, when they see enormous, imposing, gated gothic buildings, feel like the Yale kids are mixing in with them … I think you have this impression that Williams has a worse relationship with the town than other top colleges, but it just isn’t true — these sorts of tensions are even worse, I’d say, in a place like New Haven, where the economic and social disparities between students and many locals are more obvious and severe. That’s certainly how it felt to me being at a very rich school which was several blocks away (in one direction, at least) from some of the rougher neighborhoods in Chicago.

Most people who live in neighborhoods like some of those surrounding Yale live there out of economic necessity, not for cultural enrichemt. In my boyhood I lived and spent much time in various bedraggled (or worse) urban neighborhoods. Two of my boyhood friends on separate occasions got beaten on the street within an inch of their respective lives a few blocks from where I lived at that time. Car bombings in my neighborhood were a not uncustomary means of resolving “commercial” disputes between members of the mob – although I never saw or heard one occur. My neighborhood once featured a notorious deadly stabbing of a little girl by a psycho on the loose. I walked, not with impunity, the streets of my boyhood out of lack of reasonable alternatives, but getting to “know” certain of the denizens of that type of neighborhood does not amount to a worthwhile experience. I’m no social climber yet have preferred and do prefer to live elsewhere.

Jeff- Oh no doubt about it. Yale ignored New Haven for years, and the community crumbled around them. They had to play catch up in the 90s in a big way. The city is much better now than it was in the 80s. But that is not really the theme of this post.

Williams seems to be about as isolated as any college in the country. Self contained, and essentially no chance for the students to have a daily experience away from the school.

Amherst, for example, has other colleges around it that it mingles and mixes with, even in the classroom. A person is much more likely to have a broader experience in that atmosphere. The Williams experience is unique, but does that make it harder for the individual to have a unique experience?

Does Williams still do some exchanges with Bennington? How about MCLA?

Also- is being self contained and safe really better? My argument is that it is better for young adults to be pushed toward outside social interaction, rather than isolated. It is better for the mind. At Yale, students have the opportunity to experience a lot of different cultures, and the school is large enough so those young adults can hide from their peers and the peer pressures that frown on outside interactions. At Williams, you cannot get away from the culture. Not so at Yale or Amherst. How does that impact the educational experience? Perhaps, as you suppose, only a very very few take advantage of the opportunities to blend… but I suspect that you are wrong about that, and that your experience at Williams was more confined in comparison than you might like to admit, almost like going to one of the military academies.

I think you have to consider where the kids are from & where they end up spending their adult lives.

PTC, you’re from Williamstown. I could see wanting to go away for college. Frank, seems to have grown up in an urban environment. He chose a rural small town, then went somewhere else as an adult (I don’t know where), & returned to Williamstown.

College is only 4 years of your life.

One potential plus of a small residential college is that it “forces” you to interact with others. I would imagine those most happy at one are involved with the campus. It’s very easy to avoid campus life & enjoy (or be “forced” to deal with) the surrounding community when on a large campus, particularly if you live off campus & have a landlord.

For the first 21 years of my life (1935-56) I lived within the city limits of Cleveland, Ohio on fraternity row of Western Reserve University about a 1/2 mile from the center of Little Italy and about 1/2 mile from the black ghetto. I did not choose to matriculate at Williams – it was chosen for me. If I had had my way, I probably would have enlisted in the Army. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my term at Williams on balance and my fellow students (balanced and imbalanced) and learned a lot from them (if not the curriculum) in countless ways. If I had to do it again, I would go into the military immediately out of high school for a few years and thereafter proceed as indicated.